


Beautiful Boy

by Dreadnought



Series: Spent Brass [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Character Death, Relationship Problems, cremation, mom feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:01:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22308343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreadnought/pseuds/Dreadnought
Summary: March 2002. Steve cremates his mother. Bucky calls from Afghanistan.(A companion story for the ficBaghdad Waltz. This is not a stand-alone fic.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Spent Brass [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1060640
Comments: 35
Kudos: 114





	Beautiful Boy

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece for my work in progress, [Baghdad Waltz](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10261136/chapters/22734353). 
> 
> Thank you to infinity and beyond to my beta, [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/), who is a true Princess of Power. If not for her, this fic would be trash. I literally could not do this without her. 
> 
> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) and now on [TWITTER I GUESS](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap) for additional Baghdad Waltz content. Also, consider subscribing to the Spent Brass series (not the individual fics), which include BW side stories of characterological importance that didn’t make it into the fic for various reasons. There will be more in the future.

* * *

March 8, 2002

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

Steve is frozen at the door, every joint, every muscle locked down except for the shallowest rocking of his breath. It’s the only living sound in the room. But he swears, just beyond the door, that he can hear the roar of fire.

“It’s okay to say yes.”

He swallows, though he’s hardly got any saliva to do the job. The fire must be drying out the whole building, maybe even the whole of Long Island.

But he nods.

The denim of her jeans grinds as she approaches, and she props open the door for him, braces its weight with one arm so he can gape through it. And who knows how long he might stand there, fingertips trembling at the hems of his dress pants, if not for Winnie’s other hand on the small of his back, coaxing him through. Steve leans into the door as he walks through, bears his weight against it, and Winnie sweeps in behind him.

There’s a man working around the table. Around the— box. He’s lining it up, shoes shuffling on the linoleum, movements hasty but precise. Winnie’s hand comes tight around Steve’s forearm, stopping him, and they watch him do his final checks, tracking the angles with his sharp, brown eyes, smoothing his fingertips over the top of the box with nimble reverence.

He approaches them, rubbing his hands together, young but thick in all the worst ways and heavily balding. Recently handsome. His smile is gut-deep and painfully sincere.

“Can I get you anything?”

Steve blinks. Any.... what? What could he possibly get?

“We’ll let you know,” Winnie tells him. “Thank you.”

“Just let me know when you’re ready. I’ll be outside.”

The room seems to cool by several degrees when he leaves. The space breathes, the linoleum brightens, the ceilings expand. This was the best place he could afford with what little is left in savings, one of the most tasteful of the pamphlets Winnie gave him to look through. She and his ma talked it all out, back when she could string words together into sense. She must have known that he wasn’t built for this part. The pamphlets were all cut from the same schticky cloth — a faded arboreal image, maybe a thick-rooted tree or a fallen leaf, and some italicized, ellipsized text that all read the same to him: _Honor the life of your loved one by shoving them in an oven..._ He didn’t want any of it. He dropped the stack of them on Winnie’s lap during one of her bath-and-dinner visits and told her to choose one, just fucking choose one. What did he care where? But she made him put on real clothes and call the respite care service, said she was kidnapping him for two days, and when he said goodbye, his ma called him Joe and cried and cried and he couldn’t deny the relief he felt as his chest expanded outside the building and then further outside the city. They visited awful, industrial places. Loud, creepy places that he turned and left without a word. They visited posh crematories for the UES crowd with viewing rooms and Pepperidge Farm cookies and Irving Farm coffee. There’s no viewing room here. Just vanilla sandwich cookies and grocery store coffee and a couple couches in a sparse waiting room. But at least they put a dash of color on the walls. At least the cremator doesn’t look like a trash incinerator. At least they have a button.

He feels Winnie’s fingers loosen and slip from his arm. She takes a deep breath and sets her purse on the floor by the wall. Steve’s own chest heaves with the effort of a man exerting far more energy than he is now, the paralyzed, floundering energy of a wave-tossed buoy. He fingers the tip of his tie, picturing the other side of the cardboard, the breakable 83 pounds of her, her ashen, hollowed face, the patchy wisps of blond on her head, the thin arms she used to hold him with on the couch and in hospital beds and in the hammock, smelling his hair, calling him her beautiful boy. She held him until she could barely hold onto him anymore, she was so weak, and so he held her, gently, like you would hold a baby bird. When she wasn’t writhing from the headaches. When she wasn’t shoving him away, growling, snarling, crying for help, screaming for Marisol, who only comes when he’s at work. He doesn’t dare imagine what’s happened to her over the past two days. Winnie’s the only one of them who has seen her since, to identify her so that the people didn’t mix her up with some other waxen, cancer-ravaged woman.

His gaze passes down the preposterous, stark length of the box. He’s not sending her in with anything. He didn’t bring _anything_. He didn’t think. He opened his eyes this morning and looked up at the mottled white ceiling and, for a minute, she wasn’t even gone. He wasn’t coming here. She was finally asleep, not moaning, not delirious, not calling for him, and he was still a good son. And he would pad to her room and check on her and try to get her to drink and eat, even though she was refusing food and water he would try, even though she was leaving him, he would _try_. He had to try.

He could have brought a picture of Nana Flynn, the one from her nightstand. He could have slipped it in the box or taped it on or something. He could have written her something. He could be saying something right now—

“Baby, you can get closer, if you want.”

He unhinges his hip and steps forward, until he bumps the table’s edge with his thighs. Is it the head side or the foot side, is she naked, is her mouth still sagged open, did they close her eyes, did they cut her fingernails, he should have cut them, they were so brittle, the beds of them so blue, she would have hated knowing they were so long still. Did he close the refrigerator door all the way? He hasn’t cleaned it in a week, the baby carrots are probably slimy, he can’t eat all the food in there, how can he eat a whole pie, who bakes a pie, he doesn’t like blueberry, it’s not even blueberry season—

Winnie nestles in by his side, touching her elbow to his. It drags him back into the room, to the low, living sound behind the oven door, to the box, to the woman who lies inside it.

“Did you wanna say something?” she asks.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something you remember about her. Something you love about her. Something you’ll miss.” She lays her hands on the edge of the table. “Just… how you feel. Anything.”

How he feels. Anything. There’s no word for the emotion. It’s the dead air just before despair, the free fall just before completely shattering. The sense that if he does open his mouth, the gap between himself and the ground will collapse and he will smash into a spray of atoms.

He shakes his head.

“Are you sure?”

A thick, acidic sensation churns his stomach at the hatchet-swift realization that this will be the last chance he has to say anything to his mother, that in just a few minutes, her body will slide into that oven, and it will light on fire, and she won’t exist anymore. She’ll be a tiny pile of ashes, and she’ll never be a body again, and he’s already starting to forget what she looks like. Were her eyes sky blue or cornflower blue, was her mole below her left or right eye? And he’s overwhelmed by the sudden urge to throw the top of the cardboard box open, just to see her one more time. Just to confirm that she’s real.

“Your mama wasn’t scared of dying. She just didn’t want to leave you. But she got to leave knowing that you grew up to be a good man. And that’s what she really wanted for you.”

A good man? He’s barely a man. He’s barely good. What does that even mean? What good has he done? Where’s the proof? How does she know? How can she leave thinking that?

Winnie’s hand is on his arm now, smoothing up his bicep.

“She loved you so much. More than anything in this world.” She gives him a squeeze. “You were the light of her life.”

And he couldn’t help her. He didn’t even see that she was dizzy, that she was losing her balance, that she was losing weight, that she was missing more work, because he was too busy running around the city and fucking someone who would rather go kill Afghans than be with him. He was too late. Maybe they could have caught it earlier, but he was too late. And now she’s in a cardboard box.

He lays his hand on the lid, fingers splayed wide. Should it be cold?

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. His cheeks start to feel tight from the inside. “I’m sorry....”

“Why are you sorry?” Winnie asks.

His mouth opens, there are so many reasons, but the only thing that leaves is a rough sound he bites down on as hard as he can, jaw clenched with the same grinding Irish grit that she called on to bear her agony as the cancer came for her ovaries and then her breasts; as it invaded her brain and stole her mind; as she pushed him out of her small body before he had any memories of the world.

Her hand drifts slowly down his arm, gripping him. “Oh, baby…”

“I can’t.” He shakes his head. “I can’t _._ ”

“Can’t what?”

A good son sees it through to the end, just like she would if it was him in the box. A good son is supposed to make sure it’s done right. A good son pushes his mother in. He presses the button. He listens to her catch on fire.

And his hand is lifting from the box and he’s stepping back, the room blurring, it’s hotter than asphalt, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t—

Winnie turns, a stout blob with cascading waves of hair. “It’s okay. That’s fine, you don’t have to stay. They’ll take good care of her.”

He shakes his head again, blinking, limp and staggering, God _no_ , she can’t be left alone, not with them, someone has to be here, someone has to—

“Do you want me to stay?”

He blinks away the blurriness, and he judges by the cant of her body that she’s talking about staying here, and she’s sincere, this doesn’t scare her, she’s the type of woman who can make another woman burn because it has to be done. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because it’s what she wanted.

“I’ll stay with her, if you want.”

The bottom drops out from his panic and he sags, nodding.

She gives him a soft smile that makes her look pretty. It makes her look like him. “Okay.”

His steps back to the table are leaden. He doesn’t allow himself to get too close, he can’t stay, he _can’t._

But he reaches out one more time and presses his hand over what he hopes is her heart, and he hopes, he _hopes_ she can hear what he can’t say.

He hopes she knows it.

—-

Next come the thick stretches of silence, where Steve’s thoughts warp down ghoulish paths and Winnie drinks cup after cup of complimentary coffee. She’s a two Sweet’N Low, three creamer gal. That’s what she calls herself. Not a woman, not a girl, but a gal. He learned this after sitting across from her at countless diners and breakfast joints over the years, places where she calls the waiters ‘honey’ and gets away with it because she’s charming and has a good smile, and Bucky would roll his eyes and say ‘Jesus, Ma,’ but Steve always liked it because his ma is high-strung and fidgety and never really charms anyone. It’s the Bernoulli effect Winnie creates on the world around her, and he’s not sure if it’s intentional or her natural state.

But he couldn’t handle a two Sweet’N Low, three creamer gal in the waiting room, not while he imagined his mother’s pale skin charring, her organs shriveling, burning and burning until she became a dreadful skull and a scattering of thin, blackened bones, and he had to shove it out of his mind before he threw up, he was sure he would, he was eyeing the door, and he tried as hard as he could to think about A for _Atonement_ , B for _Beloved_ , C for _Catch-22_ , D for _Disgrace_ , E for… E for— shit, he could never get E, and it would be cheating if he skipped it, he couldn’t, and so he panicked, and everything shifted back into focus, and he remembered where he was, that his mother was on fire, and her skin was black and burning and he was going to throw up and probably on the floor and A for _Anna Karenina_ and B for _The Brothers Karamazov_ and—

She took it fine and pulled out a library copy of _The Fiery Cross_ , what a terrible-goddamn-titled book to bring to a place like this. And she’s blown through about a third of the pages by the time the balding guy comes back and tells them that it’s done. He doesn’t use those words, exactly. It’s some euphemism, like, everything’s ready, or they’ve got everything prepared, or something where his mother is now an ‘everything’ and not a ‘she’ anymore. He asks if they’re ready, and the edges of Steve’s vision go gray. Ready, ready for it, he— no, he’s not _ready,_ how could he be, and the room starts to feel very far away.

“Are you okay?”

Steve swallows and his head tilts forward, it probably looks like a nod, but it’s not, not really, just his own consciousness trying to escape him. But they both take it for one, and the guy retreats, floor creaking under his steps as he moves down the hallway.

Winnie slides her book back into her mammoth purse. She eyes him and gives him the same small smile from back in the oven room. There’s a tremor in her hand as she shoulders the straps, and he hopes it’s just from polishing off half the carafe of coffee. One of them has to be able to handle this.

The guy returns a few moments later with a small, dark blue cardboard box. He steps into the room with it, looking between them, and it’s incomprehensible. She can’t have gone from that box to this one in only three hours. She can’t have gone from a woman to whatever he has in his hands. This can’t be, _she_ can’t be….

Winnie stands. Even though he’s spiraling and immobilized, she seems to be able to structure this into some acceptable version of reality, and she takes the box from him and cradles it to her chest, between her large breasts, over her heart.

“Is there anything else I can do for you? Did you give any more thought to an urn?”

He’s talking to Winnie, but she’s looking down at him, as if he could possibly decide what kind of garish, decorative container to put his pulverized mother in. He shrugs, head shaking, it’s all he can do, shake and shake, his head, his legs, his insides.

“Maybe some other time,” she deflects, as if he’ll ever set foot in this hell hole ever again.

The guy presses his thick hands together again, a gesture of thanks, thanks for what, who could say. What kind of sick bastard does this for a living, what kind of family makes this their business?

“Feel free to stay for a few more minutes. But we’ve got another group coming at 2:00, so…”

So.

He doesn’t need more encouragement. It’s done, everything is _done_. He finds his bearings again and rises, towering over both of them. He didn’t realize he was taller than the man. He seemed so big earlier.

Steve cuts between them, hanging a left out the waiting room and down the hall toward the exit. He blows past the oven room and the urn room and bursts out into the mild almost-spring air. Winnie’s red Jetta is still one of the only cars in the lot, parked ass-first in the spot like a getaway vehicle, some weird habit she picked up somewhere. He strides up to the passenger side and yanks on the handle, but the damn thing is locked, there’s not even anything in it, who’s gonna steal anything from a place like this anyway?

He catches sight of her pushing open the front door, the box still clutched to her chest, his coat folded over her arm. He jerks on the handle again, and again, teeth aching.

“Gimme a minute, I got my hands full.”

It takes every ounce of his meager constitution not to rip the handle off of the door, or drive his foot into it, or slam his fist into the window, or let his jaw fall open and allow whatever comes out to erupt into the universe. Instead, he loosens his hand and takes a step back, fingers stretched rigidly at his sides, his entire body a cocked gun ready to fire.

Winnie sets the box on the roof and digs through her purse for her keys. Heat flashes through him, how goddamn _dare_ she, how could she just... _put it there_ like a Dunkin Donuts cup?

He strides to her side of the car, and she tracks his approach with a wary, stiff coolness, recoiling as he reaches past her and grabs the box. It’s heavy in his hands, a few shocking pounds, and he hugs it against his body and returns to the passenger side, nostrils flaring as his strained breath rushes through them. He pulls on the handle again and, this time, the door tears open for him.

Steve holds the box tight the whole way back to Brooklyn. It’s a long drive from Middle Island, and despite his exhaustion, it gives him plenty of time to imagine catastrophic scenarios involving car accidents — a side-swipe, a tragic rollover, a cloud of ashes, being covered in them, getting them in his mouth, in his lungs, he would look like Bucky, caked in dust, choking on his dead mother. It’s a horror that’s almost unthinkable but, of course, not quite.

“What do you want to do now?”

He knows how difficult it’s been for her to stay quiet all morning. Each of her words is propelled by a backlog of restraint, a little too loud, a little too chipper.

The Manhattan skyline is starting to get Brooklyn-big. It’s still so bizarre, like a Highlights puzzle. What’s missing from this picture? Draw two circles. He could draw three now. Four.

He runs his fingers along the smooth, blunted corners of the box. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to drop… the box off and grab some lunch?”

Not even Winnie knows what to call it. How to speak about what happened. How do humans do this every single day? How do they reorganize their reality to one where people do this to other people?

“I’m not hungry.”

“Do you want to come to my place? Say hi to Oscar?”

Steve shakes his head. Nothing sounds good, not even Oscar. The thought of enjoying anything right now feels obscene.

Winnie gives a hum that fades into the moan of the engine as she downshifts for a light. “You gotta tell me what you need. I’m not guessing very well.”

He rotates the box and the contents move, crinkling the plastic bag inside, and there’s a kinetic fluidity to it, dust falling on top of dust, and the fact of what it is suddenly crushes down upon him, not a macabre, compulsive jag of his wild mind but the _truth_ of what this is: powdered minerals in a box. Not a person. Not his mother. Because she has combusted and _vaporized_ —

He wedges the box in between his legs and presses his hands over his souring stomach.

“I don’t want this,” he murmurs.

She looks over once, then again, her dark brows furrowing as she realizes what he’s saying. “Oh, baby, just hang onto them. Find something special to do with them. What did she want done?”

“I don’t know.” _Winnie_ is supposed to know these things. _She_ was supposed to have this conversation, not him. “I didn’t ask.”

He doesn’t even know her favorite place, except for work or her room or the roof on a summer night. All the other places he knows are places she took him, little weekend trips, The Big Duck in Flanders, the Fairy Dell boardwalk. He remembers vividly the first time, he was five and he liked to name things, and at first she said yes, that’s a frog, yes, that’s a squirrel, but then he said that’s a pheasant, that’s a reed, that’s a bog, that’s an egret, and she got very quiet and scooped him up and held him close and kissed his cheek and walked with him in her arms, he was happy just like that, wrapped around her, she smelled like powder and warm laundry, and even when he was thirteen and much bigger than her and stopped naming things out loud, she would grab him by the forearm and pull him from the edges of the decaying walkway, he could see the buckled boards just fine, but he let her mother him whenever she needed to.

Except—

“She made me apply to all these schools,” he says, frowning bitterly. “Made me sit by the bed and do it. Watched me. What a bullshit waste of time.”

She didn’t want him to live and die in a bookstore, but he would be happy to, shelving books, asking people what they’re interested in, directing them to the gems they haven’t heard about, none of that Oprah Book Club tripe, if you liked that, you’ll _love_ this. The stacks are a cocoon, just him and the reader, and he can wear his glasses and doesn’t have to be athletic or sexy, and they can talk close in low, intimate voices about words and ideas and authors and he can send them out with a gift for themselves, maybe for someone else, and feel good about bringing beauty to someone’s world.

“I just want a simple life,” he says, words straining. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“You were meant for more. Your mama knew that.” Winnie sounds so sure of it all, just like she did. You could be anything you want, you could teach, you could write, you could be a professor, get your PhD, please, _please_ don’t waste your beautiful mind, I don’t know where you got it, but it’s a gift from God, _please_ don’t squander it.

It all feels very tiring, rolling a rock up a crestless hill, fighting Winnie and his ma and the irreversibility of Bucky’s choice to leave him alone. There’s no use explaining, and he’s 21 now, so he really doesn’t have to. Winnie flips her signal and takes exit 26 onto Hamilton Avenue, past the orange and blue and white of the Gulf station, Kaplan Glass and Mirror, the surly brownstones on Clinton.

She reaches over from the shifter and lays her hand on his leg. Her hands are always dry, just like his ma’s, no lotion ever seems to sink deep enough. She gives him pat, just above his knee, then leaves him to downshift and turn onto Second and then onto Woodhull, where she pulls the car over into an open weekday spot half a block from his place. This place really is too nice for them. Always was. She always sacrificed too much to keep him in Carroll Gardens, even after it didn’t make any damn difference.

“Do you need any help with anything?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“Are you sure?”

“I got it.”

It comes out cold and controlled, and he relaxes into a small eddy of self-satisfaction that he can at least do this one thing right today. He unbuckles his seatbelt before he can lose any of the tenuous ground he’s gained; she needs to know he’s okay or she’ll try to follow him in, try to feed him crappy wake food, lay her hands all over his mother’s things, and he can’t stomach the thought of any of it. He just needs to be alone.

Winnie’s hands drop onto her lap in quiet resignation as he opens the door and unfolds himself, the box wedged under his forearm.

“Call me if you need anything,” she says.

“Okay.”

He closes the door behind him and splits his attention between digging for his keys and listening for her car to stop idling and leave already, and it’s not until he’s got the outside door wedged open that she finally rolls down the street. As soon as she’s out of sight, he lets the door’s weight carry it shut again, closing with a thick, metallic snap. Beyond it, through another door, down the hall and up one flight of stairs, is everything. Everything. Everything except the container he holds. Forty-one summers and forty-two winters of life, her own beautiful mind nobody begged her not to squander, her small, careful hands, her too-wide mouth and big teeth, her laugh, her arms, her smell, all of it has been baked down to the box of ash in his hands. She’s gone. She’s nothing and nowhere and there’s not even a God for her to go to.

He sinks down onto the stoop and doesn’t move for a very long time.

— — —

Steve scoops half a forkful of cold tater tot green bean hamburger sludge into his mouth with a grimace. Christie calls it “hot dish” but he’s pretty sure it’s just a casserole, something that could be tasty if he’d bothered to warm it, or if he had any appetite at all. She sent him home with it three days ago, actually sent him home when she caught him whoring around the break room for extra shifts, ostensibly for financial hardship, which is a true fact of his life now, truer than ever; he will be living on Winnie’s couch in a few weeks if he doesn’t find a roommate soon. But he was completely useless at work, hardship or no, and so he’s been restlessly slogging between his bed and the bathroom and the kitchen and his bed again, where he falls in and out of troubled bouts of sleep and crams tasteless bites of food in his mouth to choke down. The wasting is painful but the effort to eat is more so. He’s been rotating old dishes out of the fridge and stuffing in new, wishing himself an appetite but hopelessly queasy and disinterested, scraping piles of food into the trash, trying to remember whose casseroles belong to whom, it’s all a blur of crockery.

It’s a marvel how many people are heartbroken about her in death when so few seemed to care about her in life, perhaps because her illness was so ubiquitous, almost a part of her personality, Sarah with the Really Bad Breast Cancer Gene, you know the one, poor woman, she should have had the double and not the partial, how vain to keep both, he overheard that once on the ward, whispered very, very quietly, but maybe they were right, maybe that’s why she’s dead now, how oddly cavalier, why of all the things to not be afraid of, of all her fears, why wouldn’t she have them take both, maybe he should have done research, maybe he could have persuaded her, he could have gone to the library at Mount Sinai or NYU or Columbia or Einstein and found some articles, he was smart and resourceful enough, he could have even asked one of his teachers, but he just nodded with everyone else, and all it takes is one cell, and now all he has is a cardboard box that’s been sitting on the coffee table since Friday.

He powers through the last bite of hot dish he can stomach and looks to his nightstand. It’s crowded with dishes, blood-dotted tissues, glasses, barely an inch of real estate to spare, so he sets his plate on the floor next to the half-drunk mug of ginger tea from earlier this morning. The mess feels insurmountable, his own mess, everything of hers — the walker, the bedside commode, the pink puke basin, the toothbrush and baking soda rinse, the nystatin, the hospital bed they haven’t taken yet, the sheets, the stacks of pillows, Nana’s bible, Winnie’s afghan, the half-empty box of LivDrys, the wipes, the A+D cream, the latex gloves, the Kleenexes, the tubes of Aquaphor, the lotion, the baby monitor, her brush, the straws, the mugs of melted ice chips, the pill bottles, the humidifier, the unopened case of chocolate Ensure, everything. Every trace of her body’s relentless campaign against her, every link in the chain of her suffering, and all the comfort he tried to wage against it in a war he couldn’t win. It’s all still in her room, behind a door he can’t bring himself to open again.

Steve pulls in a long breath and ducks his head to take a sniff of himself. He needs a shower. He needs to sleep. He needs to clean. He needs to send thank you notes. He needs to pay the electric bill. He needs to contact the bank. He needs to cancel her driver’s license. Did someone call Social Security? What about her debit card? He doesn’t know where he put her pocketbook. Probably in there, or, God, maybe it’s in the kitchen, but he doesn’t remember seeing it in there, it can’t be in the living room, but why would she have it in her room, there’s nothing—

The ring of the phone jerks him violently into focus, heart racing, but his alertness shifts quickly to scorn, because it’s probably one of the credit card companies or the hospital, asking about money, when is he gonna pay them, does he know she has an outstanding bill, is he aware how much it is, does he have a copy of the death certificate, and he should really let the goddamn thing go to voicemail. But it’s a 718 number, maybe it’s one of his ma’s coworkers, another _Oh so sorry for your loss she was such a good woman such a wonderful nurse such a good heart_ , and he’d rather talk to a creditor than hear more of that shit.

He stares at the screen until it stops ringing.

Then it starts again. Same number. He can take a hint, and he’s very prepared to be rude if he needs to be, so he steels himself for a tell-off and presses the Talk button.

“Hello?”

“Hey.”

His lips part, thoughts clearing like the quick sweep of an arm across a table, leaving only varnished emptiness.

“Can you hear me?”

It’s a little hard to, with the rumble of chatter in the background, a low static of men’s voices, some climbing high enough to hear clearly. _Yeah, I bet she does. Miss you, too_.

Steve crosses his legs and settles himself in the twisted nest of his bedding, pulse fluttering as he scrambles to put all the pieces together, the Brooklyn number, the noise, the time, maybe they’re already home, somehow.

“Yeah. I can.”

“It’s fucking loud in here, sorry,” Bucky says. “Guys are trying to weasel some second calls in. I got 15 minutes.”

“Is this your second?”

“Nah. Just at the back of the line. ”

None of this makes any sense. “The number’s local. Are you—”

“Ran out of minutes on my card and had to call the Fort Hamilton switchboard. Didn’t have time to put more cash on it. Been busy.”

“Ah.”

Steve doesn’t know deployment speak yet. They never worked out a code or anything. Never worked out a pre-arranged list of topics, things they should talk about, things they shouldn’t. Nobody taught them how to do this. Nobody gave them the Rosetta Stone for how to be a secret couple at war, or how to be any couple at war. He doesn’t know if busy means busy tooling around on some makeshift base or busy marching around some desert or mountain or busy in combat, God knows he’d probably never know if something bad has happened. Bucky’s not the type of guy who ever deliberately makes his problems other peoples’.

A deluge of questions floods him and he’s drowning in them: what’s the weather, do you sleep in a bed, have you had a shower, where are you, have you been in combat, did anyone die, did you kill anyone, why did you leave, do you miss me, are you scared—

“Are you okay?” Steve asks.

“Doing fine. Tired.”

“How’s the food?”

Bucky groans. “Terrible. We had fucking nonstop MREs for almost two weeks. Had an interruption in the supply chain for a bit, so then we didn’t even have those, but we finally got some hot food so things are looking up.”

An interruption in the supply chain? What do you eat when you can’t even have MREs? What’s the backup for an MRE?

“They didn’t feed you?”

“Eh, logistics got a little hairy for a while. It’s fine now.”

He hunches over as his gut churns irascibly through the sludge of his lunch.

“Do you know when you’re coming back?”

“No. No idea.”

Bucky says it as plainly as he says they haven’t been feeding him. Could be a week, a month, six months, how long was the Army in Desert Storm? How long did men stay in Vietnam? Jesus, get real, it’s not Vietnam.

The background noise rushes into the dead space, where Steve’s frantic stream of questions have dried into a thin, fragile crust.

“Say something.”

Steve bites around the edge of his thumbnail bed, one of the only ones he hasn’t completely ripped to shreds. Say something? Say _something_? “Like what?”

There’s a low rush of air on Bucky’s end. “I don’t know. Anything. Something normal.”

“Something normal.”

“Yeah.”

For a few innocent moments, he scans through the last few weeks for something that might be normal. It’s an experiment of thought, scientific, rational, rule-bound and emotionless. But there’s absolutely nothing, not even a new normal. Everything happened so fast, she changed so fast, each new symptom a wild careen in a new direction, he read about a litany of possibilities, each combination as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint, she could do this or she could do that, or she could do none of it at all, there were so many lesions by the time she got the scans back, scattered around like a sick game of connect the dots, each one displacing a different part of her brain, and when she said she wanted to... just let everything happen, let it go, she was too tired, she just wanted it to be over, she already decided by the time she told him, all the rules of chemo and radiation and the things they both knew were gone, and it was just punch after punch, each one driving her further away from him, four months of reeling and he’s reeling still and he wants to hear something _normal_?

“How’s your ma?”

Steve blinks. How is his…

How could she not tell him? How can he not know? It’s been almost a week— how can he—

“Hello?”

“She’s dead.”

“ _What_?”

“Last week.”

It comes out with dull, telegraphic succinctness. Fact one, full stop, fact two, full stop. The emotion has contracted away, furled under some rock deep inside him.

“Oh my God... I’m so sorry...”

There’s a muffled shout and a spate of cackles, then a rough sound, like the swipe of cloth over the receiver.

“ _Hey, shut the fuck up! Jesus Christ._ ”

The laughter stops, and ambient rumble of men dies to an eerie hum, maybe a generator, maybe an engine, maybe the drone of half a world of land and mountains and water.

“Sorry.” Bucky’s voice gravelly and stretched thin, as if that shout was the last, sputtering burst of fuel he could pump from a spent tank.

“It’s fine.”

“How are you doing?”

“How am I _doing_?”

“Yeah.”

Steve bites down on his lip to keep himself from— he imagines he might yell, chest heaving, a geyser of rage, he might pull the phone from his face and scream into it, very angry people do it on TV, he’s not even sure what he might say except how dare you how dare you how dare you ask me how I’m doing you fucker—

“Steve?” he murmurs.

Steve clears his throat. When he speaks, he does not yell.

“At least your mother has been around, because there has literally been nobody else here who has given one sincere fucking shit.”

“I’m so sorry. I wish I could be there—”

“Yeah, so do I.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah, I am.”

He does sound sorry. Bucky can do pathos and sincerity when he needs to, it’s not even a put-on. Steve has seen the surface crack, watched the glib artifice peel away before him, revealing shadows and fathoms of depth and peaks of breathtaking light, and even though he has always been so restless in their love, Bucky has the power to become the core of the Earth. After every inconclusive test, every night spent home alone with her across the bridge, every round of cell-obliterating treatment, he was gravity itself for an entire year, configuring in and out of his own adolescent chaos whenever Steve needed him to, without him even asking. How can that person be this one? How did such a constant become such a variable?

“What are you sorry for?” Steve asks.

“That your mother died.” He pauses, softening. “That I can’t be there.”

“But see, you _could_ be here. That’s the point of all this. You could be. You chose not to be.”

“Listen—”

“You’re not even sorry for leaving.”

Bucky’s silence speaks for him, and Steve bites his cuticle hard and pulls, tearing it away with a wince. A thin line of blood seeps from the edge of his nail.

“And that’s... this just isn’t gonna work,” Steve concludes.

“What?”

“This.” Steve swallows. “Us.”

“Listen, I can’t talk about this now,” Bucky says, mumbling now that he’s forced the room into quiet.

Steve snorts. “Yeah, how convenient for you.”

“Can we just talk about this when I get back?”

“Get back here? Or you mean Campbell?”

“I mean—”

“Which you won’t even let me visit? Or I guess there’s always Nashville for another secret weekend fuck—”

“Are you fucking nuts?” Bucky hisses. “Shut up about that.”

Steve clenches his molars, hand scrubbing over his face. He never signed up for this. For these are-they-or-aren’t-they-monitored deployment calls. For years of separation. For quick and dirty rendezvous in Southern cities where Bucky is too scared to even sightsee because they might somehow look too gay just walking together. He never signed up to be someone’s omission. He never signed up at all. He just fell in love. He fell in love with his friend and his friend loved him back and that was it.

“Fine,” Steve says.

He thinks Bucky might say _God_ , and the line is quiet for a few moments. When he speaks again, it’s with mechanical ease, the way he gets when they’re fighting and he just wants to go to bed.

“I’ll have some leave when I get back. I’m coming home for a while.”

“So, for a week? Maybe two?”

And the thought despises him, but he would give anything for a week, maybe two, right now. He would drive his ma’s car to JFK right now, to La Guardia, to Newark, he’d drive all the way to Kentucky to get him, to bring him home. He’d get a hotel, he’s still got a night or two’s worth of money on his card, he’d pull him into bed and hold him and kiss him and be kissed and held and weep in his arms, Jesus Christ it’s all he wants.

“Well, a week or two is better than nothing,” Bucky says.

Steve curls his fingers around his bloody thumb and squeezes.

“You know what’s better than nothing? If you hadn’t gone active duty in the first place. There was no reason for you to leave.”

Bucky sputters. “Yeah, no reason. Just 9/11.”

“Right, because you’re such a patriot.”

“Hey, people need me here.”

“I don’t give a fuck about them!” Steve snarls.

“Well, I do!”

“Yeah, no shit. It’s clear where your priorities are. You know this is supposed to mean something, right? Or do you even know that?”

“ _What_ is supposed to mean something?”

And he wants to scream again, he almost really does this time, his face is so hot, so tight, but he remembers who may or may not be listening. But is it even real at all? Is it just more paranoia? Is this just—

“Look, what can I do?” Bucky mutters. “What can I do to fix this? I’ll do whatever. Just tell me.”

“Fine. Go to your commander. Tell him.”

It takes a few seconds to land, but when it does, Bucky’s calm shears away.

“Really? I’m in fucking Afghanistan right now, and I have people to lead. I have people to take care of. There’s no fucking way.”

“Of _course_. Important people to lead, big battles to fight. You know, don’t tell me you’ll do anything, because that’s just not true.”

“We’re not gonna be here forever. We’ll be back soon, things will calm down—”

“And then you’ll find some other excuse to not do it. Because this isn’t about the Army. This is all you.” He plants his elbow on his leg and presses into his brow with his upturned palm. “You care when it’s easy, but when I actually need something that costs you something, you’re gone. You’d rather go to Afghanistan — fucking _Afghanistan_ — than be with me. And I’m just— I’m tapped out. I’m done.”

Bucky exhales slowly. “I am begging you, please, please just wait til I come back.”

“I’m alone, Bucky. I am fucking alone. And you want it both ways. You want me on the side waiting for you, wringing my fucking hands while you fuck off and play Army until you get tired of that too.”

“Oh, come on...”

“I need you _now_. I needed you to be here. I never ask for anything from you.”

“That’s bullshit. You want _everything_ from me.”

“If wanting you, just wanting you, is wanting everything, then yeah. I guess you’re right.”

Bucky breathes his name. Pressure builds in his sinuses, behind his eyes. He closes them tight.

“You made your choice,” Steve says. “And it’s fine. Go lead your men, have your career, it’s your life. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“I just wanna see you again,” Bucky whispers. “ _Please_.”

Steve’s stomach turns violently. He rolls onto his side, knees curled in, arm clutched to his gut, cordless phone drifting from his ear, he’s not even bargaining, not fighting, just please, _please—_ he hears his name, very softly, a whisper in a cupped hand, he imagines him hunched over some… desk? Table? Booth? In a tent? A trailer? A building? Please, Steve, _please—_ And suddenly he’s so young, so fragile, soft tissue covered in warm skin, and all it takes is one bullet, one fleck of shrapnel, a slip on unsteady ground, and he’s imagined him the way she looked but lying in dirt, pale, eyes dark and staring vacantly at the Afghanistan sky, mouth slack, like he’s just about to say something but forgot what it was, soldiers gathered around him, hanging their heads, they’ve given up too, nothing they could do, _one shot, one kill_ , just like he used to joke about, that’s how people die in war, isn’t it, when they barely have any body armor in a land that even the Soviets couldn’t master, and the image fills him with dread, helpless, quaking dread, and he cannot fucking do this anymore.

“Please...”

It’s barely uttered. Exhausted. Steve sniffles and presses the phone to his face again.

“I still want you to stay safe—”

“ _No_...” Bucky’s voice breaks.

“You have to come home alive. You—”

“Remember what I said to you that morning? When I left for downtown? What— I wrote it at the end of my letter, I— I’m saying that now—”

“No!” Steve shouts. “God _damn_ you. No.”

“I love you.”

“Stop. Just stop. Don’t you fucking say—”

“I _love_ you. Please don’t do this. _Please_.”

“I’m hanging up now. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

His thumb hesitates over the End button. He could save this, right now, he could put the phone to his head, call it a fight, call it grief, apologize, he can be the fuckup this time, but Bucky doesn’t even care that he left. He doesn’t even regret it. And fuck him for running, because he should fucking _be here_.

He presses the button. Lets his arm drop to the mattress. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus _Christ_.

The phone rings. He looks at the caller ID.

He has a fantasy then, of answering the phone again and ending it all for good, as if he could just utter a few choice words like “babe” or “I love you, but I can’t be your boyfriend anymore," and some man with headphones in a dark room somewhere would hear it and Sergeant Barnes’s secret would be out, and then _he_ would be out, and he’d just have to go to college like a normal person and be gay like a normal person and he would be safe and he’d be home and maybe he’d never forgive him but what the hell would he have to lose because it’s already over it’s already fucking over it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s _over._

The ringer stops, and the phone slips out of his grip as the great weathered cord between them snaps, and it’s like a kick in the chest, knocking the air out of him, his eyes going wide from the force of it, and it’s that free fall again, he can’t call back, he can’t call at all, it’s over, he could die tomorrow, he could die tonight, and the room becomes a white hole he’s tumbling through, no ground, a frictionless vacuum, and he curls his body tighter while panic mounts, nausea redoubling, vision dimming, sweat breaking across his skin, this can’t be happening, she can’t be dead and he can’t be gone, what did he do, what did he _do_ — and he’s gasping for air choking swallowing back everything that’s trying to explode out of him— it wasn’t supposed to be like this they were supposed to have dinner together, why didn’t he just say yes, why didn’t she have them take both, why didn’t he notice, why couldn’t he shut his goddamn mouth, why did he have to ask, why did she leave him without even fighting, without even _trying,_ why and why and why—

—and it goes on for hours, wave after merciless wave of it, until he’s flopped over the side of the bed, red-faced over the garbage can, trying not to be sick from hyperventilating, from fighting it, from damming back a tsunami he won’t survive, not after everything, he can’t swim this one out.

And then a sound: three thwacks against solid wood. It startles him upright, God, it’d better not be more neighbors with more casseroles, he can’t take any more, he won’t. He’s done with fair weather well-wishers.

But then, the scratch of a key, and the top deadbolt turns, then the bottom one, then the knob, and no, not Winnie, _not_ Winnie. He licks the dried blood off his hand like an animal and wipes everything away with the closest Kleenex he can snag off the nightstand.

“Hello? Steve?”

There are steps across the floorboards, then the clank of keys dropping into the key bowl. She forgot to lock the door again, God, but he can’t be mad because he can practically see her surveying the space. The piles of unwashed dishes, the sticky floor, the dirty counter, the mountain of mail, the papers all over the side table, the box, the mugs, all the things of hers from when she had her last good days outside her room, strewn around like breadcrumbs leading back to a closed door, and the creaking gets closer, until she appears in the doorway with the lean nurses do when they don’t want to be a bother but obviously are one.

“Hey, sorry to barge. I’ve been trying to page and call but didn’t hear back. I was getting worried.”

She glances around the room, from the dishes to the clothing tossed on every surface to the mess of a bed he’s been living in for a week straight.

Steve checks the phone. He doesn't remember turning the ringer off but obviously must have at some point. He scrolls through the caller ID, heart leaping when he sees a 718 number but sinking again when he recognizes it as hers, over and over and over. And his pager has been dead ever since she has been. What’s the point anymore? Yet another service to cancel, another thing to add to his interminable list of ways he has to adjust, things he has to do.

She takes a few steps into the room and pulls back the curtain. She seems untroubled, moving easy. She still must not know.

“How you doing, baby?”

He huffs. “Everything’s a mess.”

Winnie knows how to use humor when nobody else can get away with it. And even though his ma wasn’t funny in any terribly clever way, she would laugh at Winnie’s cancer jokes, her diaper jokes, her skin-and-bones jokes, the sound of it as brittle as her wasted body, but it was so genuine and it was needed and it was always just right, God knows Steve could never do that for her, he was always too scared and as sober as death itself.

So she might say anything right now, any number of airy ribbings about the wretched state of the apartment, how disgusting he must look and smell, maybe with a dash of Bucky’s sarcasm — or maybe it’s been hers all along and that’s where he got it.

But she only nods a few times. “Well, let’s start cleaning things up.”

She moves towards him then, and he stiffens as she nears the bedside, fingers tightening on his crossed legs. She looks him over — his nasty t-shirt, his old sleep shorts, the blood stain on them — and she runs a hand through his hair. He can feel it stick up wildly with every pass, it’s so long now, he can’t remember the last time he had a cut.

“You need a shower.”

He ducks away from her. “I know.”

She lets her hand fall to her side and steps around his dirty laundry to get to his dresser.

“Do you have clean clothes?”

She opens up the drawers one-by-one and begins rifling through whatever’s left in there, clothes he hasn’t worn since high school but can’t part with, a couple of sweaters, one with a bleach spot he’s never been able to account for, another that he dug out for an impromptu New Year’s dinner at Vinny’s. She was so oddly lucid, rippling with energy after nearly a week bed-bound with headaches and terrifying flights of disorientation, and she demanded to leave the apartment, she was starving, and yeah, she ate almost a whole bowl of penne Bolognese herself, declared it the best thing she’d ever eaten in her life, except for every meal he had ever cooked for her, they both had a good laugh at that, and he really had to look close at the wine menu then, even though he couldn’t read anything on it, it was all so watery, he had to give her a good night, a happy night, he couldn’t think about how it was probably the last time they would ever eat at a restaurant, how the rest of their time together was now a countdown of lasts. Because it was supposed to go the other way, wasn’t it? She was supposed to see him get his own apartment, be there when he got married, see him have children, move out of the city, buy a house somewhere green, she would have loved the vastness of the country sky, the splendid quiet.

But she chose her own vastness, and he chose a sky so far away that they can barely share the same daylight. And now there will be no more firsts. There will be no more lasts.

Winnie bends low over the bottom drawer. “Do you have clean underwear?”

He makes a sound, a pathetic whimper, a child’s sound, and it might be okay, like an errant rush of air out of a dead body, not a sign of life, he read about it in a hospice pamphlet, it’s fine, nothing to worry about, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s _okay_. But then she turns and looks at him, head tilted, brows drawn in worry, and the beams of his control start to buckle, he feels his face twisting, he could never let it before, he could never let her see or hear it, he never knew when she was awake, and they say they can hear even when they seem unconscious—

“Baby, it’s okay. I’ll just get a load going.”

A sob cracks out of him, like a spasm, and a gasp, maybe he can grab it, hold it tight, he tries—

“Oh, sweetheart.”

She climbs onto the bed and sits next to him, and she lays her hand on his back and smooths it over him, even though he’s sweaty, even though he smells, even though he doesn’t have any clean underwear, it’s all over the floor, even though he dumped her son, and he can’t tell her, he needs this for just a little longer before she’s done with him, too.

He can’t stop it now, the horrible, painful weeping, and she pulls him in close, wraps her arm around his back, he’s so much bigger than her, but he lets himself collapse and become small, and she says _It’s okay, baby_ and _shh-shh-shh_ , and rubs his shoulder while his mind spins, there’s so much to do, he’s done so bad, how could he have done this bad with everything all at once, how does a person fuck up this bad, how does he— how can he fix it—

“I need— I don’t know, I—” He forces the words between sharp hitches of breath. “Garbage bags—”

She pats his arm. “Okay, we’ll get some.”

“I need...”

He doesn’t know. He has no fucking idea. He wipes the snot off his face with the back of his hand and curls it into his stomach.

“We’ll get it all, don’t worry.”

But he does worry, because she’ll go home after this, and the apartment will be quiet, and there will be no moaning and no calling out and no one else breathing, just a silent box of dried up bones, and the panic swells again, it’s weaker this time, he’s just so tired now, but he’s still trembling with it, and she pulls him closer and pets his greasy hair as she talks, her voice low and soothing.

“Why don’t you come to my place tonight, and we’ll wash your undies and get a pizza? And tomorrow you can hang out with Oscar while I’m at work, and we’ll come back after I get off and get started on some of this. If you don’t mind sleeping in Ricky’s room. I'm sure he wouldn’t care.”

Despite how addled his mind is, he can think of many clear and good reasons why he shouldn’t go. But she’s holding him and she’s warm and she’s alive and she loves him. And that’s all there is. That’s all there is.

So he presses his face to her sweater, even though he has to hunch down to do it, and he nods. And she is almost a hammock swaying on a summer night and a pile of warm laundry he can fall into forever, arms wrapped around him tight. My beautiful boy.


End file.
